Tips To Become A Great First Time Manager
First-level leaders have never been more relevant. Executive adviser and best-selling author Ram Charan observes that the rapid digitization of information has eliminated massive layers of leadership in organizations. Work is collapsing down, not up. Which means that the vast majority of people are reporting to first-level leaders, who now assume unprecedented influence and responsibility.
In the “olden” days, first-level leaders had multiple managers above them who had steadily climbed the leadership ladder, accumulating experience along the way. Junior managers could draw on their expertise for mentorship and feedback. But today, most of those layers are gone, often leaving first-level leaders without sufficient resources or support.
In this role, you’re supposed to know the strengths and weaknesses of your team members, appear to have all the answers, and transition from focusing on your own results to achieving the team’s results. Overnight.
Despite being the new performance linchpin in your organization, you’re often the least experienced and least trained. You’re learning by trial and error because you have no other choice. Researchers in the Harvard Business Review found that, on average, people take on their first leadership role at age 30—but don’t receive their first leadership training until they’re 42.
Imagine a physician, a pilot, or an engineer operating untrained for a decade—it’s unfathomable. Why would we tolerate a lower standard for the linchpins of our organizations?
To give you the confidence and competence you need to meet the inevitable challenges of managing, FranklinCovey has shrunk the bewildering world of first-level leadership down to the six most critical practices for leading a team. These practices have been field-tested by thousands of actual leaders working with real teams. This content expands upon FranklinCovey’s leadership solution “The 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team”, now adopted by thousands of companies, governments, nonprofits, school systems, and universities around the world.
Employees often report that their relationship with their direct leader is the most meaningful relationship in their professional lives, and determines whether they stay with a company or move on. If you become a great leader using the following insights and skills, you’ll find greater job satisfaction, opportunities for advancement, and the chance to affect the lives of others for the better. You’ll become the manager you and your team deserve.
Develop a Leader’s Mindset
Paradigms are the lenses through which we view the world, based on how we were raised, indoctrinated, and trained to see everything in front of us. We all wear these metaphorical pairs of glasses, and they vary in accuracy. They might be the right prescription or slightly off. In some cases, you might have a metaphorical cataract.
Your job as a leader is to continually assess your paradigms for accuracy and ensure they reflect reality. So ask yourself what you believe about leadership, your team, and yourself. Maybe you believe that the colleagues who think like you are high potentials and those who challenge you aren’t. Perhaps you believe you’re not really leadership material and someday everyone will find out.
As Dr. Stephen R. Covey taught, if you want to fundamentally change your results, if you want long-term sustainable impact, you have to challenge your mindset.
Most high-performing, driven people promoted into leadership realize that they must now fundamentally change their approach. But many of the paradigms that got you promoted won’t make you successful as a leader.
Mindset shift. When you become a leader, your definition of results needs to change. When you were an individual contributor, your results were the work you did. But now you’re a first-level leader, so you own the results of everybody on your team. Your first job is not to get results alone but with and through others. In other words, your people are your results.
You might be thinking, “I didn’t even hire these people!” But part of your job is to discern the talent, coachability, and potential of each member of your team, whether you hired or inherited them. You have to learn who can—or can’t—rise to the new standard you’re requiring. But before you consider dismissing an employee, remember that they might just need a leader who can challenge and inspire them to a new level of contribution. That leader might be you.
Hold Regular 1-on-1s
People rarely quit their jobs based on compensation; rather, they quit their manager. Or they quit the culture. So it’s imperative to consider the conditions you are creating for a compelling work environment.
Because you’re a leader, you’re noticed. Every time you communicate, every time you open your mouth, you create culture. And 1-on-1 interactions are one of your best tools to build and reinforce the type of culture every team member deserves. Strategically planned and executed, 1-on-1s are arguably the best way to create the conditions for high engagement and ensure your team members are connected to you as their leader.
If our main interaction with our team members is to check that they’ve hit key benchmarks, we become our team’s monitor. You might get incremental improvements this way, but you’re just as likely to deflate people’s energy, zap their creativity, and drive them to do the minimum.
Effective leaders use 1-on-1s to coach. They create the conditions for engagement by meeting regularly with each team member, drawing out issues through open-ended questions and empathic listening, and helping people solve problems.
Prepare for Your 1-on-1s. Let’s establish some best practices for 1-on-1s. Schedule them in advance as recurring calendar appointments. Reserve at least 30 minutes, because it’s difficult to have meaningful conversations in less time. Hold them regularly—the gold standard is weekly—and commit to that date and time without moving the appointment if possible
Coach During the 1-on-1. In this practice, we’re shifting from monitors of actions to coaches of people. That requires you to no longer tell people what to do, but to ask them how they would do it. When you make this transition, you’ll move from directing and informing to inspiring and engaging. Coaching means respecting your team members’ abilities and believing they have the capacity to grow. It means encouraging them to problem-solve, think in new ways, and develop their talents. Some colleagues will resist solving their own problems because they lack confidence. Coaching builds that confidence and minimizes dependencies.
Set Up Your Team to Get Results
Many people come to work every day and have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing. If people are doing their jobs solely because their boss told them to, it sucks engagement right out of a team. If you’re not delegating, you’re an individual producer masquerading as a leader. You may think nobody knows. In fact, they do . . . everyone knows. In contrast, the effective mindset helps your team become invested in decisions and understand the big picture behind the daily grind. But it does require an ongoing investment of time, patience, and maturity. Great leaders plan goals with their teams rather than for them and delegate tasks without abandoning or micromanaging. They shift from telling team members what to do, to aligning their work to greater purposes and supporting their efforts.
Align Goals to Organizational Priorities. By focusing on the right priorities, you can achieve amazing results; but with the wrong focus, you can take the ship down.
Delegate. How you handle delegation affects your team’s growth, engagement, and motivation.
Create a Culture of Feedback
As a leader, your job is to summon the courage and consideration to provide actionable, specific, and sometimes tough feedback to your employees. It’s an art, not a science, and it’s learned through repetition. It isn’t just a nice-to-have skill; if you want to be an effective leader, you must learn to do this.
The common manager mindset is to think of yourself as “the fixer”: your team has problems, so you think it’s your job to point out what they are doing wrong through feedback. In contrast, the effective mindset is all about unleashing the potential in others—including yourself, when you seek feedback.
Giving feedback comes down to motives. Your team has to know your intent is to help them develop their skills and talents. They have to feel secure and safe with you. And that doesn’t happen overnight; you have to build a reservoir of trust
Give Reinforcing Feedback. Positive feedback is encouraging but doesn’t provide specific enough information about what the person did well. Reinforcing feedback clearly communicates that a team member’s behavior, attitude, or work is outstanding and that they should keep it up. It can influence behavior change and increase engagement.
Give Redirecting Feedback.Redirecting communicates that the employee is capable of a stronger performance with some guidance. It’s feedback intended to let someone know that a behavior, an attitude, or a result needs to improve—and you believe it can.
Lead Your Team Through Change
When change comes your way, it is arguably one of the strongest tests of your leadership capability. Nothing will shape your team’s ability to adapt to change more profoundly than the way you approach it. If you resist change or feel overwhelmed, confused, or skeptical, your team will adopt that same frame of mind.
Manage Your Time and Energy
To feed your brain, you need to manage your time and energy, and for long-term results, you must coach your team to do the same—especially because we’re now working more than ever, burning out more than before. Gallup reports that about two-thirds of the workforce is now struggling with professional burnout. As you progress on your leadership track, you must decide how you’re going to work, balance your life, and renew yourself. Establish the patterns now that will serve you long term.
Becoming a great leader takes time, repetition, successes, and failures—they’re all equal parts of the formula. So relax, and give yourself some space. It’s a journey, and it’s worth it.
